Sunday, September 23, 2012

“I don’t want to hear
none of your tales, boy… Too many tales come from these mountains and
everwhere…”*

The
Ozark Mountains breed many legends. In the foggy hollers there, tales abound
of witches, of the impending revolt of the Nini indians, and of a
chicken-legged man-monster known as the Yarp. Yet another to have once roamed
those hills was rockabilly legend Frank “Andy” Starr, the Rockin’ Rollin’
Jumpin’ Crazy Stone.

Born
into abject poverty, named after a U.S. president, Franklin Delano Gulledge (b.
1932) grew up in a dirt shack near Mill Creek, “about six mile from Combs,
Arkansas.” Hismother struggled to feed the brood bestowed upon her by her
rounder husband. The elder Gulledge, Grover Cleveland by name (yes, such naming was a family tradition), came and went according to the movements
of an itinerant hustler. He was rarely present in the home. To help out
around the dirt farm, sister Drew sold the Cloverleaf Salve that arrived by mail
order. She sold so much, in fact, that she won a prize: a cheap guitar. The
siblings all shared that guitar, beating and bashing it in the hillbilly fashion, but young Frank took a true shine to it. Blowing thru Mill Creek again around that
time, G.C., a fiddle player himself, heard his middle son strumming on that
mail order guitar. Father encouraged son to “tag along in the
Key of D.” He liked what he heard and began to take his son with him to play
the local dances held in cabins around the hills.

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